Progress
by YamiTami
Summary: Snake needs a new hobby. //Snake&Otacon, pairing if you want it to be, friendship if you don't. Dry, Britcom humor//


**Since people are still interested in my fics over here and FFN has fixed a couple (but not near all) of the issues it's been having, I'll start posting my stories here again. This is really against my better judgment and if they screw up so that dashes disappear or the ads somehow get more annoying, then I'm not coming back. It's bad enough they still don't allow tildies for no apparent reason.**

**I'm posting this in chapter one of all my stories so everyone knows where I can be found. See my profile for the link to my homepage.**

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Everyone needs a hobby. Even if a man loves his job more than anything there are times he may need a bit of a break from it, do something just for the hell of it. When your job involves getting shot at, blown up, and being attacked by massive two-legged death tanks, the relaxation gained from such a hobby becomes all the more important. It's why Snake threw himself into the care of his huskies after the hell of Outer Heaven. By extension he got into the dogsled racing world, only running smaller, local runs himself to avoid drawing too much attention, but keeping up with the rankings of the big-league teams.

Unfortunately his hobby was geographically dependant and once he, Otacon, and Philanthropy left the realm of moose tracks in the snow it was hard to keep track of the musher's scene. After all, no constant address made it impossible to find magazines for it anywhere south of the Canadian border and only the Iditarod got serious news coverage and even then it was on the obscure ESPN channel that hotels tended not to get. There was, of course, the internet, but there was no way that Snake was going to admit to his new partner exactly how computer illiterate he was. The soldier was sure that Otacon, naivety aside, already had a pretty good idea of how bad Snake was at technology, but still. He didn't want to have to say it out loud.

And so, after nearly two months of valiantly holding on to the dream, Snake resigned himself to finding a new hobby. Other sports were quickly dismissed; as far as he was concerned, it wasn't getting any better than a team of dogs and the snow flying away under the sled. Hitting a ball with a stick just couldn't cut it. Also removed from the lineup were movies; if he could keep a stead alias then he might have signed up for some unlimited rental deal, however, that wasn't how his life worked and one time rentals wouldn't be cost effective. He found himself wishing that he wasn't quite so incompatible with technology. Otacon was always able to keep himself entertained with nothing more than a web browser.

Literature, the old standby, took the spotlight for a time, but there were only so many stories in existence and tales told well were increasingly hard to come by. Eventually he turned to different translations of his old favorites, seeing how the ideas matched up. Finding exactly how much was lost in translation was amusing enough and it kept him reasonably entertained; The Hitchhiker's Guide in Russian was a gem of incomprehensibility. What he found really amusing was how surprised Otacon was to learn how many languages the soldier was fluent in. Then Snake asked if the programmer had any second languages and, predictably, 'a little Japanese' was the answer.

That small exchange led to a new hobby, however, one that was a little more involved and eventually more fulfilling: improving Otacon's Japanese. The man could understand most of what was said in his anime without the subs, but his speech was still jerky enough to make Snake wince. Turned out that he'd only had once teacher who was actually Japanese, and she focused more on writing and sentence structure than the actual saying of words. Otacon's pronunciation was decent (probably due to how much subtitled anime he watched). Still, it would be nice if the hacker could say a sentence in another language without coming across like a train wreck.

And so, Snake started talking to the other man in Japanese at all times, unless they were on the job. Otacon was surprised when it started, but he soon fell into the 'lessons' with the same enthusiasm he applied to babbling about Eve-something. The exercise in language started in a time where being in the other's presence was still an awkward experience, and being able to talk about simple, pointless things like what color the garbage truck was (a little bigger pause before the _wa_) really did help break the mile of ice between them. It really was a good thing that Snake became sensei; after all, they were both socially stunted and from opposite sides of the spectrum so far as attitude and interests. At least they both enjoyed the language, and Otacon was a good student. He wasn't afraid of being told he said something wrong, in fact, he welcomed criticism because, in his own words, can't fix something if you don't know it's broken.

It surprised Snake how quickly Otacon took to the proper way of speaking. Only a month and the hacker didn't sound like he had a crippling stutter, a couple more and he was passably fluent. At least, Snake wouldn't be embarrassed to know the man if they ever had a mission in Japan. Sadly for the soldier, Otacon's amazing progress saw the end of that hobby and left him in need of another.

He almost asked Otacon to show him how to use a computer (they'd gotten just comfortable enough with each other for him to consider the possibility) but rejected the thought after realizing that, while Otacon would have no problem being the teacher, it was unlikely that Snake would be able to understand anything the other man said. The hacker might start out on 'click the start menu' but it would end up in some abstract plane of ones and zeros within the first five minutes. Getting into the anime his partner watched was thrown out for similar reasons; that Trinity-whatever vampire show looked pretty good, but there's no way Otacon would _ever_ stop talking if Snake ventured down that road. He liked his partner (something that snuck up on him and would perplex him for some weeks after the realization), but there was only so much one man could take.

He fell back to mistranslations, which somehow elicited a self-depreciating comment from Otacon about how he could never learn that many languages. This deeply confused Snake as the man could work in at least a dozen different computer languages (he kept a running tally in the back of his mind, adding a mark whenever Otacon mentioned yet another name for the gibberish he was typing). And, as the name suggested, computer languages were indeed languages, and a tongue than Snake knew he would never grasp. The soldier didn't even really take the other man seriously until he admitted to being a hacker, at which point Otacon jumped several levels in Snake's esteem. Just because the soldier didn't understand what the hell all those numbers and symbols added up to didn't mean that he couldn't respect those who did. Not to mention the fact that said hacker's hacking had saved his life on pretty much every combat mission they'd been in on together.

Snake knew that Otacon had some self-esteem issues (it was kind of hard to miss). However, he thought that founding Philanthropy was a sign of vast improvement. Turns out it wasn't as vast as he thought, and he didn't need his tech losing faith in himself. There was something else in the back of the soldier's mind, the part that liked the geek a hell of a lot more than he'd ever admit between the danger of caring and grr-i-am-man. Something that wanted to keep Otacon from falling as Snake himself had before Philanthropy.

The new question was how the hell to go about it. Subtlety was obviously the only route to go as bluntness would only earn legitimate suspicion and anger over being patronized, which is how Snake tended to sound when he was being obtusely complimentary. And then the new new question was how to be subtle. Sure, the soldier knew how to sneak through a heavily guarded base without being detected (and when he was detected, take care of it with minimal noise). Unafraid to use his gun for deadly purposes, but only if the other bastard opened fire first. There was a reason why he had to be tricked into Shadow Moses, after all.

There was also a reason why he never got within a mile of undercover. He was good at physical stealth, battlefield psychology, getting the mission done silently even if he had fifteen bullets lodged in his gut (though actually only seven slugs remained in his side; why the guy had a shotgun instead of the base's usual rifle he'd never know). He was _not_ skilled in social activity. Not to mention that Otacon wasn't ever going to get any better unless he stood up for himself, not just be told that he was good with incomprehensible techno-babble.

The answer came to him late one dead in-between-jobs day, stretched out across a reasonably plush library couch with a novel he selected at random, the heavy clacking of the community-grade keyboard off to his side where Otacon was trying to contact some contact or the other.

He _was_ skilled in being an irritating bastard.

Bit by bit, Snake started annoying his partner. He shied away from invading personal space because anytime he forgot himself and put his hand on the other's shoulder the tension would radiate off the hacker. He wasn't sure what in Otacon's past led to such a reaction, but it's not as though he didn't understand bad memories, so touching was out. It was a pity, Snake found himself thinking, for the programmer was almost certainly ticklish as hell.

So, Snake was left with verbal jabs, which were just blunt enough to not sound forced and just subtle enough that Otacon didn't notice the growing number right away. The soldier didn't flat out insult his partner, or even roundabout insult, because that was going to get nothing done. The closest he got were the hints of challenge, particularly before missions involving heavily cyber-defended systems that needed a good cracking. Snake noticed early on that Otacon responded well if something was presented to him as a puzzle to be solved, sort of the way Snake got things done sooner and better if he mentally phrased the tasks as missions. He played on that as much as he could without getting noticed, though unfortunately Otacon's hacking skills were one of the few things he rarely found major fault with. His techno-babble was superior and he _knew_ it, which was good because Snake's life depended on his confidence in that field. Still, Otacon remembered that there was always room for improvement and didn't get complacent with his code, also good because Snake hated analysts who thought they were all that and a bag of chips.

As Otacon already had faith in his ability to produce unintelligible strings of characters that would make most of the general population's heads to explode, those little boosts didn't really affect the programmer's overall self-esteem all that much. Other weapons had to be employed. The challenge formula remained since it was what Otacon responded best to, be it a network to crack or an old-school puzzle to solve. Before a long, long plane flight Snake bought a paperback for himself and a Rubix cube for his partner, who seemed to be pleasantly surprised. Snake handed over the plastic toy with some distaste; he remembered the days so long ago when he had to solve similar logic puzzles for various tests and trials. Just because he could do them didn't mean he enjoyed it. The opposite was true for Otacon, at least the enjoyment part. He talked Snake into scrambling the thing, and after around an hour of spinning the stickered sides he almost-smugly set the solved cube on Snake's tray table. Not one to turn down a challenge either, Snake spent the next hour re-scrambling the puzzle, doing a much better job of it than his half-effort the first time, and Otacon still solved it , moving lazily, five more times before they landed (twenty-three hour flight; they had to change planes and double back several times to avoid detection). Another month and Otacon went out and bought himself a five-by-five Rubix, along with a stack of hexagon tiles who's purpose Snake actively didn't learn; he'd had _enough_ of those things in basic.

The puzzles, while better than the hacking, still existed in the realm of the PHD (and Otacon had two of them for good reason). Snake needed Otacon to be confidant in some other field. What that field would be doable eluded him.

If there's anything the chocolate chip cookie taught the world, it's that the best things in life are accidents. Or perhaps the potato chip would be a more appropriate metaphor: the best things in life come from someone trying quite deliberately to piss someone else off.

If Snake had gotten any sleep the night before then he probably would have been glad (or as close as he got) for the fact that Otacon was arguing with him. It was the first time in their working relationship that the skinny nerd raised his voice even the slightest, let alone all out yelling at the solider. Snake didn't even remember how it started, he was that tired, but somehow it ended with a biting comment about Otacon's poor physical condition. The hacker just glared at Snake and walked away, and which point Snake woke up a little and realized that might have been a mistake. Like hell he was apologizing, though.

The next day when Snake was in the meager living room doing sit ups Otacon came in with a couple of boxes. The solder ignored the programmer as he fiddled with the stuff over by the TV (had to be bought by their personal pay that the hacker never dipped into; Snake's was dedicated to smokes and the occasional book). A few minutes and a pounding beat blasted through the small room and Snake paused in his counting somewhere around ninety. There was a square mat laid out on the floor a foot away from the box the TX sat on, a cord leading up to a black rectangular piece of electronic with cord leading to the front of the TV. There were some anger-filled stomps setting something up and then a song started and multicolored arrows started scrolling up across the screen.

Snake knew that Otacon couldn't have played this 'In The Groove' for nearing a year as that's how long they'd been at Philanthropy (amazing how time flies) and was surprised at how well the programmer seemed to be doing on 'Hard' mode, which seemed fairly hard. The soldier couldn't understand how a man who stumbled over his own feet at least twice a day could do that without falling over, but there Otacon was. Halfway through the first song Snake went back to ignoring the other man, but the TV helpfully announced the grades. The first round netted two Bs and a C+. Otacon growled at himself in frustration and went at it another four sets before turning everything off and setting the mat against the wall.

The second day Otacon only managed two rounds, a long break, and then one more on 'standard mode,' likely due to day-after soreness from starting a new exercise routine. Day after he got up to four, and on the fourth day he stubbornly pushed himself to five rounds on hard despite the fact that it was obviously making his legs hurt. A week the two men ignored each other before somehow simultaneously deciding that they'd been childish long enough and started up pleasant conversation (still mostly in Japanese). Otacon didn't stop doing his groove thing during Snake's exercise sessions, however, though he did stop pushing himself beyond usefulness and picked songs far less offensive to Snake's tastes. He got his 'arrow-legs' back fairly fast and was netting an A+ or higher (Snake didn't get where the S came from) on every song. Three weeks after it began he was playing through the soldier's 45ish minute sessions, three rounds on heavy and two on challenge. As time went on he worked up to harder songs until one day he managed B+ to S- on all five sets on challenge. Snake finished his doorframe pull-ups just around the time Otacon netted the final A- on the pirate song.

The hacker looked over his shoulder at the soldier, a sense of real pride and accomplishment in his eyes. He didn't say 'thanks,' but it was written on his face clear as day.

Snake spent the rest of the week in a good mood.


End file.
